


She

by LauraEMoriarty



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-23
Updated: 2013-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-26 16:07:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/652047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LauraEMoriarty/pseuds/LauraEMoriarty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place just after Shepard chooses the "destroy" ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She

  
She  


Who always seems so happy in a crowd  
Whose eyes can be so private and so proud  
No one's allowed to see them when they cry  
She  
May be the love that cannot hope to last  
May come to me from shadows of the past  
That I'll remember till the day I die  
\-- Elvis Costello, She.

He found her amidst the rubble of the Citadel, barely breathing. Fear gripped his heart as he walked towards her broken body, lying there all twisted and maimed, looking for all intents and purposes as though she had gone to heaven. Kaidan’s mind was whirring with the possibility that the woman he loved was dead. She couldn’t be dead—she had to live, for everyone’s sake. She was a hero, a saviour, a lover. She was everything that was good about humanity.

Kaidan pulled the rubble away slowly, everyone behind him looking as he did so. _Please don’t let her be dead._ Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the anxiety on Garrus’s scarred turian face. He thought it fitting that Garrus was there, for he had been with Shepard since the days of hunting down Saren, had been there when he could not be. Eden Prime had begun it, and the last attack had brought it all to a head, and he wondered what would happen when Earth was rebuilt, when it all adjusted to a new normalcy. But those were thoughts for another day. Right now, his priority was rescuing the woman he loved, the woman he wanted to marry and have children with—children that would know the truth of their mother’s sacrifice, and her mottled history. It was not going to be a tale told by an idiot, but the sound and fury would be there in the telling.

He reached her. She was barely breathing when he pulled the last piece of rubble away . Gently, he lifted her into his arms, wiping the blood away with his sleeve, tattered and torn as it was. She had to live. She just had to. He didn’t want to go on without her, and nor did any of the others that had banded around her like an honour guard. He could hear the booming of the last Reaper being destroyed, the ground shaking and people struggling to keep upright. “Kaidan…” it was the sound sweeter than salvation, her voice hoarse and struggling. “You came for me….” He heard the shallow breathing, each word took her every ounce of strength she possessed. In that shallow breathing, he heard the death rattle of the dying soldier. He had heard that rattle too many times. 

“Hush,” he said, planting a soft kiss on her brow, “Reserve your strength.” He ran then, ran like hell to the Normandy. Dr Chakwas could put her right— at least save her from dying. The door to the shuttle flew open, as James reached out his hand to pull him in, taking Shepard in his arms as Kaidan sat down. She just had to live. Live so he could marry her, tell their children stories of their exploits. If she didn’t live, he would have no hope for himself. This time, it would be him sitting beside her bed, bringing her stuff to eat when the hospital food got to be too bland for her recovering palate, bringing her magazines and telling her the latest news. It would be him who taught her to use a knife and shoot a gun again—he had no illusions that she would need to relearn everything. If, at the end of it, she wanted to elope to some far flung planet, they would do that. They had the rest of their lives ahead of them, now that she had saved the galaxy. The Alliance could ask nothing more of her, for she had paid the price, she had done what she was assigned to do: she had stopped the Reapers.

The booming of the last reaper destroyed was the only thing they could hear in the background—a deafening, final sound of the threat defeated. As Kaidan carried her into the med bay, the Normandy crew looked at him, and then at the broken body of the commander that had brought them through hell and back. They parted as he walked forwards carrying her, and only James spoke. “Lola needs to rest now, yeah?” James said, taking charge. “But we, as her crew, need to show that we can run this ship while she rests.” He crossed his arms across his burly chest, feeling that as the youngest member of the Normandy’s crew, he should’ve taken the blow she had been dealt. “I’ll stand watch, and then the rest of you can go after me.” He wouldn’t like it if she got hurt on his watch-- or even died on his watch. He felt protective, even though she wasn’t his girlfriend or his lover, she was his commanding officer, and one of the strongest women James had ever met. It was probably a chauvinistic, chivalrous feeling, but he didn’t care right now. 

Later, Kaidan would remember the way she smiled at him. The bed felt wrong without her: it always felt wrong when she wasn’t there—whenever he rolled over to wrap his arm around her waist only to find the cold sheets where she was meant to be. He got up, pulling on the only available clothing he had, and went down to the med bay. He leaned his head against the cool glass, before deciding to go in—he was a man, not a mouse—and sat down, taking her hand in his. Her eyes blinked open, the intensity of her blue irises more shocking in her battered and bruised state. “You came…” It was the same words she had said to him on the Citadel, and her voice had been less hoarse then. “You should’ve let me die. I fucked it all up.” She turned her head away, and he could see where they had shaved it for emergency surgery. Her beautiful red hair was shaved off in one patch, and there was an IV line—he assumed it was the only place Karin Chakwas had been able to find a vein that wasn’t shot to hell. After all, his own biotic implants had caused problems when he had been out of commission. Finding a vein had taken forever.

“Let you die?” He questioned, confused, running his thumb over her hand. “You didn’t fuck up. You saved the entire galaxy.” She turned her head away, as though guilty of some unspeakable crime, something she was yet to admit to herself. It pained him to see her blaming herself for the fate of things better left up to the admirals and those who were probably congratulating themselves for winning the war. “Hackett said as much.” Shepard snorted softly at that, though he wasn’t sure why. Some things were best left unexplored, some wounds were better left to scab over and heal, rather than be picked at until they bled again and again.

“I had a choice. Wipe out the synthetic life-forms forever, including our friend EDI, or merge the organic and synthetic life together. The final choice was to become a reaper—and I could never do that. Those dreams I had? The child in those dreams was there—he was the Catalyst, and he told me what choices, ugly as they were, I had.” She couldn’t bear to look at him—his face brought into sharp contrast what she had chosen and the enormity of her choice. Her choice had been ugly, and it would take her years to work out what the fuck she could’ve done. “Commander Shepard…. Anderson was right, I should’ve been tossed out of the Alliance years ago…” She snorted softly, awash with doubt. She had come from nothing, yet had won honours in the Skyllian Blitz, when she had saved the colony of Elysium. It was why the Illusive Man had spent two years rebuilding her after the original Normandy crashed and burned. Even now, three years later, she still felt that she should have gone down with her ship—it was what captains were meant to do, regardless of whether that was a myth or not. She blamed herself for what she had chosen, a selfish choice that made her no better than anyone else. She was the hero of the Skyllian Blitz, had taken down the Collectors, and even though she had saved the galaxy, it had come down to a simple choice: three different panels to choose from. She had chosen life--- to let things come as they would, whatever happened in the future. As a wise philosopher had once said, the only thing she could focus on was the here and now—not some horrendously abstract concept of fifty thousand years into the future. She had made the choice she had made, and now the galaxy would have to live with it.

Kaidan said nothing, though his mind was whirring at the thought that she could’ve chosen to become a reaper—something he swore was an impossibility. The thought that his beloved Shepard could have done what the Illusive Man had failed to do was beyond comprehension—but he knew her. He knew what she was like, he knew she would never have chosen that—it would’ve gone against everything they’d ever fought for. Yet he knew she needed this—catharsis—in order to heal properly. If she wanted to talk, he would listen, running his thumb over her hand soothingly. They talked long and late into the night, laughing at old comrades, remembering the fallen, talking about personal things that only they knew. When morning, or what passed for morning on the Normandy arrived, they had fallen asleep together, hand in hand—Kaidan’s head in his arms on the bed. A particular moment had occurred while they talked long into the night, both of them talking about the stories of old, the ones that mattered. He was reminded of a classic story, an epic tale from the twenty first century, one that was full of danger and heroes who had plenty of chances to turn back, they realised that one day, maybe someone would write their story.

“What’re we fighting for, Kaidan?” She had asked him, quoting a line from a film, an old favourite of theirs. It was an old film, a classic for its time, full of danger and darkness. “Is it worth fighting when everything’s gonna go to shit in the end?”

Kaidan had shaken his head, smiled, and quoted the next line of the film. “That there’s some good in this world, Shepard. And it’s worth fighting for.” This time, it was she that smiled, leaning her cheek against his hand. Long into the night they talked, laughing, remembering fallen comrades, talking of stories they had read and loved over the years.

Ultimately, the end of the world as they knew it would end in chaos. They were fans of that old poem, Fire and Ice—it spoke to them of their battle against the Reapers, and all the fire and blood from the decimated shell of Earth. It would take aeons for the galaxy to return to a new state of normalcy—this cycle had never dealt with the Reapers before this, and hopefully, the Reapers would never return. As the Normandy went past a particularly bright star, the med bay glowed with warm light that radiated hope for everyone and everything. A new day, and a new dawn was coming, filled with hope and prosperity for all. A golden age, possibly, but that golden age had been won at a terrible, terrible cost. The synthetics would come again—they would always emerge—from the wheel to the exceptionally advanced artificial intelligence, it was inevitable. Yet she had chosen this—she had chosen to live, to defy the stars and whatever other fate was out there. She knew how bitter the consequences were—the ones she had crossed the stars for. Perhaps it was a selfish choice, but Shepard knew only her life, she could only see things through her own eyes, and the eyes that judged her the most harshly were her own.  


♥♥♥♥♥

  
In the months that followed the rebuilding of all things the Reapers had destroyed, Shepard and Kaidan found themselves busier than ever before. Lights danced where once there had been darkness and shadow. Somehow, in the midst of all this heady rebuilding, there were moments that passed between them: private, loving moments that they had all the time in the world to enjoy.

Walks along the newly-installed viewing deck on the Normandy, hand in hand, smiling and laughing at each other’s bad jokes, to candlelight dinners in her cabin—these were the things that made them stronger. “Remember when Liara threatened to flay someone alive with her mind?” Shepard once said, leaning her head against Kaidan’s shoulder. “Or when she assured us that she was a very good Shadow Broker?” Kaidan reached to put his arm around her waist, and smiled. And then there were the nights when neither of them could sleep—both of them disturbed by dreams that were night terrors, the type of dream where they woke up suddenly, breathing hard, and glancing around the room to make sure they were in their own warm bed. 

Shepard dreamed she was back on Rannoch, back playing chicken with a Reaper in order to give the Normandy and the Quarian fleet time to attack. She remembered Legion’s sacrifice, the sacrifice that was necessary and ugly to win the war against the Reapers. She remembered too much, felt too much, shed her tears in the privacy of the privy. It was not in her nature to cry in front of others—that had been beaten out of her when she was just a child on the streets of Earth, running with the wrong gang, being lucky enough to enlist in the Alliance as soon as she could. They had saved her in ways she had not expected, and when she won honours in the Skyllian Blitz they were beyond her wildest dreams. She remembered much—the hard faces of the children she had seen in the Verge, the face of the angry Salarian Dalatrass as she repaired the Veil and cured the Genophage—and those remembrances brought her both pleasure and pain. Yet despite all the things she had done she still remained the little girl who had been so desperate to get out of the life she had lived.

Now she was, for many, an almost goddess-like figure. It surprised her how people treated her: they seemed to think that she had singlehandedly saved the world from wrack and ruin. She had only been one of many responsible for that—it was not her alone that saved them. Aboard the Normandy, they at least treated her like a friend and not a hero. She could talk to her friends and crew without the feeling that they were in awe of her. So many acts of so-called heroism were merely rushes of blood to the head in the heat of a battle—so many Victoria Cross recipients, Military Medal recipients—they were merely acting upon impulse. Shepard understood this—she understood it better than the adoring crowds who came out in droves to see her take a walk and inspect repairs being done to the Presidium.

They were interested in anything she did. It got tiring. Constant flashing of cameras and omni-tools got old—she craved her privacy more than ever, and spent weeks and weeks in space avoiding them. She visited Rannoch, marvelling at the resilience of the Quarian people—their ability to take back a land that had been so barren and inhospitable reminiscent of the Jews of old, except they had reclaimed their Israel. Shepard had never been to the Middle East, but she was sure it was just as barren, just as desolate, just as horrible and full of flies and dust. Yet there was something so indescribably remarkable about it as a planet—something that drew her to it, something that would keep her coming back for years to come. It was definitely one way to escape the prying eyes of the adoring public. It was like Africa, the mystic quality of Africa that drew people back there—the pull of some deep primordial urge, from the cradle of civilisation to the river Nile.

The wind through her hair, the serenity she felt when on Rannoch was indescribable. It was the one place in the entire galaxy where she didn’t have to worry about being on display—Tali’s people had welcomed her into their homes with open arms, and protected her from any paparazzi or stray vid recorders. It was her private retreat, though Tuchanka would’ve suited her well. But it was the two planets where she had made a stand against the Reapers and won. That was enough for her—the knowledge that she had helped the Quarians take their home world back, that they were now no longer dependent upon the Liveship fleet. Had things changed for the better? Shepard wasn’t sure.

♥♥♥♥♥♥  


It came one night, completely unexpected. It’d been a hard, long and tiring day, and the last thing she had wanted to do that night was talk. Of course, when she got to her cabin, Shepard found him there, having lit it softly, and their favourite music—one would go as far as to say it was their song—was playing over the loudspeaker. She smiled a tired, warm smile as he came to her, wrapping her in his arms. “Marry me, Shepard?” he said softly into her ear, and she nodded in response.

“Just waiting for you to ask me, Kaidan,” she replied warmly, spinning herself around in his arms to face him. 

And that was that. 

♥♥♥  


“Daddy! Anne’s being mean again!” A little boy with his mother’s bright red hair streaked down the hallway of the Normandy, running towards his father’s arms. Kaidan picked up Gilbert with a smile, and laughed. They had had everything they ever wanted aboard the Normandy, and now their own family would be raised there. A girl with Kaidan’s hair and her mother’s blue eyes followed behind a tall woman, smiling as she reached her husband and son. “She wobbled me!”

Anne’s eyes flashed. “Carrots, I didn’t wobble you!” Shepard looked between her husband and her children, and smiled again. “Mummy, he’s making it up!” She was torn between a gale of laughter and a bemused smile. She wasn’t sure what to do.

“Anne, Gilbert. Bedtime. Aunty Liara will read you a story…” Gilbert pouted. He didn’t want Aunty Liara’s stories tonight—her stories were fabulous, but he was in a temper. 

“Why don’t you and Daddy ever tell us stories?” Anne asked, hands on hips and looking like her mother. “I wanna hear a story from you, not Aunty Liara.”

Shepard looked at Kaidan with a helpless look. She wasn’t a storyteller like Liara or James were. Her life was something the children would learn from others about. “I don’t really know any stories…” she said helplessly, hoping the children would take a hint. “Except for this one story about how Mummy and Daddy met…”


End file.
